San Jose hearing on ‘Pillowcase Rapist’ release

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The impending release of a serial rapist who terrorized women in Santa Clara, Los Angeles and other counties is the subject of a public hearing Wednesday in San Jose.

Christopher Hubbart

Christopher Evans Hubbart, 63 — who has recently been referred to as the “Pillowcase Rapist” because he muffled victims’ screams with a pillowcase — is scheduled to be released from Coalinga State Hospital, a psychiatric facilty, to a home on the 20000 block of East Avenue R in a sparsely populated neighborhood in Palmdale in unincorporated Los Angeles County.

But Judge Gilbert Brown of Santa Clara County Superior Court has agreed to give members of the public a chance to sound off on the decision.

Hubbart, who was known to break into the homes of women who were alone, has been in and out of prisons and mental institutions since 1973 and has been convicted of 34 rapes. He was 21 in 1972 when he was convicted of sodomy, rape and burglary in Los Angeles County. He was committed to a state prison hospital and paroled seven years later.

He moved to Sunnyvale and worked in a printing shop. In 1982, he was convicted of false imprisonment, rape and forced oral copulation after a series of assaults, and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Hubbart served half the time and was paroled in April 1990. He was arrested again that June and convicted of false imprisonment for an attack on a jogger.

Shortly before his scheduled release in 1996, two mental experts found that he posed a high risk of assaulting someone again. Now, he will be forced to wear a GPS ankle bracelet and obey a curfew, among other security precautions.

A Palmdale landlord agreed to rent a home to Hubbart, and Judge Brown tentatively approved the location. According to published reports, an appellate court last year denied a bid by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office to place Hubbart in Santa Clara County. Previously, another landlord who had offered a home to Hubbart backed out in the face of public outrage.

Hubbart won’t be present at the hearing, which was scheduled from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday with a break for lunch. Palmdale residents were expected to attend and speak out, and Los Angeles County prosecutors were expected to deliver thousands of letters from community members.